N. Cherif and A. Yongacoglu are with uOttawa, Canada. W. Jaafar is with École de Technologie Supérieure, Canada, E. Vinagradov and S. Pollin are with KU Leuven, Belgium. H. Yanikomeorglu is with Carleton University, Canada. This work is funded by Huawei Canada, Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), projects no. S003817N (OmniDrone) and G098020N. \(^*\) Authors have contributed equally.
What are the advantages of UAV-mounted wireless communications? It increases the chances of a stable Line-of-Sight (LoS) dominated channel to ground terminals [1]}. UAVs can also move and optimize their locations to satisfy the dynamic service demand [2]}, [3]}. These two features represent the core of all innovative wireless communication solutions enabled by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), including UAV base stations (UAV-BSs), also called on-board radio nodes (UxNB) by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP).
The limited battery capacity is the main challenge to fully unleash the UAV-BS potential. To overcome this issue, several solutions have been proposed such as i) deploying recharging stations,
ii) battery or UAV swapping, and iii) laser charging. Moreover, providing UAVs with permanent energy supply through a tether, a.k.a., tethered UAV (TUAVs), has been proposed as an alternative to the aforementioned solutions. Nevertheless, this concept offers unlimited flight time at the expense of limited mobility due to its predetermined hovering region [4]}.
